Capcom certainly took its sweet time bringing Mega Man to the Super NES back in the day, as the company relied on its existing Nintendo Entertainment System for Mega Man to bring two sequels to the old system before getting down to business with the 16-bit Mega Man X (and launching one more NES installment after it). Prior to X becoming, well, X, the next generation adventure carried a different, more generic name. Travel back in time with Protodude's Rockman Corner to an early 1993 report from Game Players magazine to learn all about the fantastic Super Mega Man.

"We understand the game is well into development, but haven't seen anything yet," says Joseph Morici, senior vice president of Capcom. "You can assume, however, that the game will be substantially better than other versions just because of the quality of the machine."

Although Morici doesn't have much information on Super Mega Man, he does know that it includes a fairly large memory configuration and a battery backup — definitely something new for the series. He's got bad news for Sega Genesis fans, however. Like Street Fighter II, there's "nothing in the works" for a Genesis Mega Man. There's no 32-bit CD-ROM game in the planning stage, either.

Considering how history eventually unfolded, one wonders if Morici was just spinning assumptions for our amusement or if Mega Man X actually was once planned to contain a battery backup. Moreover, versions of Street Fighter II and Mega Man for the Sega Genesis did eventually come to pass (in late 1993 and late 1994 respectively), so if Morici did know anything about them at the time of this interview, he wasn't sharing it. I believe him about the lack of a 32-bit CD-ROM game in the works at the time. Super Mega Man 3, er, pardon, Mega Man X3 on CD didn't launch until 1996, and here the company was still working on the first game in the series at the time of this interview.

Incidentally, I stumbled upon this piece of concept art over at The Mega Man Network which appears to show Mega Man — not Mega Man X, but the classic Mega Man — drawn in something of a proto-X style along with a Mettaur and a traditional and proto-X take on Cut Man. Perhaps when we speak of "Super Mega Man", we're really talking about the concept on display in this image. sketches for Mega Man X: Command Mission. So never mind then.

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Whatever Happened To Super Mega Man?

Capcom certainly took its sweet time bringing Mega Man to the Super NES back in the day, as the company relied on its existing Nintendo Entertainment System for Mega Man to bring two sequels to the old system before getting down to business with the 16-bit Mega Man X (and launching one more NES installment after it). Prior to X becoming, well, X, the next generation adventure carried a different, more generic name. Travel back in time with Protodude's Rockman Corner to an early 1993 report from Game Players magazine to learn all about the fantastic Super Mega Man.

"We understand the game is well into development, but haven't seen anything yet," says Joseph Morici, senior vice president of Capcom. "You can assume, however, that the game will be substantially better than other versions just because of the quality of the machine."

Although Morici doesn't have much information on Super Mega Man, he does know that it includes a fairly large memory configuration and a battery backup — definitely something new for the series. He's got bad news for Sega Genesis fans, however. Like Street Fighter II, there's "nothing in the works" for a Genesis Mega Man. There's no 32-bit CD-ROM game in the planning stage, either.

Considering how history eventually unfolded, one wonders if Morici was just spinning assumptions for our amusement or if Mega Man X actually was once planned to contain a battery backup. Moreover, versions of Street Fighter II and Mega Man for the Sega Genesis did eventually come to pass (in late 1993 and late 1994 respectively), so if Morici did know anything about them at the time of this interview, he wasn't sharing it. I believe him about the lack of a 32-bit CD-ROM game in the works at the time. Super Mega Man 3, er, pardon, Mega Man X3 on CD didn't launch until 1996, and here the company was still working on the first game in the series at the time of this interview.